Adobe Business Catalyst

We Put CreativITy Back Into IT.

Problem

Adobe Business Catalyst’s hardware required updates that were too costly and time-consuming.

Goal

They wanted to focus on deploying and operating their own software instead of costly infrastructure.

Solution

We migrated their three datacenters to AWS within their aggressive timeframe and manage the environment, allowing them to better support their customer base.

About the Business

Adobe® Business Catalyst is an all-in-one, hosted marketing solution and unified platform that allows web designers to create powerful business websites and online stores in minimal time and without back-end coding. It is also a one-stop-shop for flexible content management, e-Commerce, customer relationship management (CRM), and targeted email marketing with powerful reporting and analytics. From web pages to online shops and email marketing to lead management – Business Catalyst records every customer interaction and gives you the tools to track them.

The Business Challenges

With 120,000+ active sites, tens of millions of email messages processed each month and 100 TB of data served each month, Business Catalyst required the computing power of three global datacenters in order to support their existing customer base. When the hardware at its datacenters required a costly and time-consuming upgrade, Adobe decided it was time to move the Business Catalyst systems to the cloud, yet the company had an aggressive timeline to complete the migration. Because of these time constraints and overall complexity of the project, Adobe engaged 2nd Watch, an Amazon Web Services Premier Consulting Partner, to lead the migration process and to help select a cloud vendor.

“The sheer complexity of the Business Catalyst migration and tight timeframe to complete the project required us to engage with a partner who had experience in both datacenter transformation projects and Amazon Web Services. It was key that we completed the project on time and within budget, while ensuring our customers weren’t adversely affected,” stated Fergus Hammond, Senior Manager of the Cloud Hosting team at Adobe. “2nd Watch fit this criteria, and their service was great from start to finish – the team always responded quickly, provided an experienced staff and worked well with both our domestic and international teams, even going as far as sending a team of experts to Romania to ensure the success of the project.”

The 2nd Watch Solution & the Business Benefits

As the company behind Creative Cloud, a suite of creative tools and services that runs in the cloud, Adobe was very familiar with cloud operations and environments. While Adobe employs many qualified IT associates with deep experience, the environments offered by most of the cloud vendors 2nd Watch evaluated required additional technical staff with the operational experience to complete the migration successfully within the given timeframe. Following the comprehensive search for an accomplished cloud vendor, 2nd Watch recommended AWS for its ease of integration and cost effectiveness.

Once Amazon had been chosen, 2nd Watch began the migration of Business Catalyst’s three datacenters to the AWS cloud, eliminating the costs associated with managing Adobe’s on-premise infrastructure. 2nd Watch also created cloud replicas of Business Catalyst’s physical datacenters in each region, allowing Adobe to seamlessly test each new cloud datacenter while the existing datacenters continued to service customers. As each cloud datacenter was validated, 2nd Watch migrated all user data and service endpoints to the AWS environment. The Business Catalyst environment now utilizes AWS EC2, VPC, Elasticache, S3 and SES, and the migration was completed by the planned deadline, allowing Adobe to focus on deploying and operating its own software instead of costly infrastructure.

“The Business Catalyst migration is similar to the type of project we’re increasingly seeing enterprises engage us to execute,” stated Matt Gerber, Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing at 2nd Watch. “This datacenter transformation project, with its extremely tight timeframe, is a testament to our extensive knowledge and expertise with public cloud providers and our agile ability to meet the customer’s needs.”

Going forward, 2nd Watch will act as an extension of the Adobe IT operations team to monitor and manage Business Catalyst’s AWS environment, providing Adobe a complete, end-to-end solution for the datacenter transformation.